؊4 nucleotide changes per site per year was estimated. This is the first animal-human zoonotic pair of coronaviruses that can be analyzed in order to gain insights into the processes of adaptation of a nonhuman coronavirus to a human host, which is important for understanding the interspecies transmission events that led to the origin of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak.

No abstract

Background: Four human coronaviruses are currently known to infect the respiratory tract: human coronaviruses OC43 (HCoV-OC43) and 229E (HCoV-229E), SARS associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the recently identified human coronavirus NL63 (HCoV-NL63). In this study we explored the incidence of HCoV-NL63 infection in children diagnosed with respiratory tract infections in Belgium.